CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT STUDY GUIDE

Poll tax

a tax levied on every adult, without reference to income or resources.

Literacy test

A literacy test, in the context of American political history from the 1890s to the 1960s, refers to state government practices of administering tests to prospective voters purportedly to test their literacy in order to vote.

KKK

a secret organization inspired by the former, founded in 1915 and active in the southern and other parts of the U.S.

Civil disobedience

the refusal to obey certain laws or governmental demands for the purpose of influencing legislation or government policy

Brown V. Board of education

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional.

Emmett Till

Emmett Louis Till was an African-American teenager who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, a seminal event in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama.

MLK JR.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement.

Birmingham Demostrations

In 1965 Shuttlesworth assisted Bevel, King, and the SCLC to lead the Selma to Montgomery marches, intended to increase voter registration among blacks.

Selma and Bloody Sunday

The three Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 were part of the Voting Rights Movement underway in Selma, Alabama.

Voting Rights Act

Voting Rights Act of 1965 definition. A law passed at the time of the civil rights movement. It eliminated various devices, such as literacy tests, that had traditionally been used to restrict voting by black people.

Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall was the Court’s 96th justice and its first African-American justice.

Great Society

a domestic program in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson that instituted federally sponsored social welfare programs.

Cesar Chavez

Cesar Chavez was an American farm worker, labor leader and civil rights activist, who, with Dolores Huerta, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association.

Grandfather clause

The Grandfather Clause was a statute enacted by many American southern states in the wake of Reconstruction (1865-1877) that allowed potential white voters to circumvent literacy tests, poll taxes, and other tactics designed to disfranchise southern blacks.

Jim Crow Laws

The Jim Crow laws were racial segregation state and local laws enacted after the Reconstruction period in Southern United States that continued in force until 1965 mandating de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern U.S. states (of the former Confederacy), starting in 1890

SCLC

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is an African-American civil rights organization. SCLC, which is closely associated with its first president, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had a large role in the American Civil Rights Movement.

Sit-in movement

The sit-ins started on 1 February 1960, when four black students from North Carolina A&T College sat down at a Woolworth lunch counter in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina.

Little Rock Nine

The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas.

Civil rights

civil rights movement definition. The national effort made by black people and their supporters in the 1950s and 1960s to eliminate segregation and gain equal rights.

Nonviolent protest

Nonviolent resistance (NVR or nonviolent action) is the practice of achieving goals through symbolic protests, civil disobedience, economic or political noncooperation, satyagraha, or other methods, without using violence.

Rosa Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an African-American Civil Rights activist, whom the United States Congress called “the first lady of civil rights” and “the mother of the freedom movement”.

March on Washington

March on Washington, in full March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, political demonstration held in Washington, D.C., in 1963 by civil rights leaders to protest racial discrimination and to show support for major civil rights legislation that was pending in Congress.Aug 1, 2013

Freedom Summer

Freedom Summer (also known as the Mississippi Summer Project) was a campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi, which had historically excluded most blacks from voting.

Malcolm X

Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little was an American Muslim minister and a human rights activist.

Children’s March

The Birmingham Children’s Crusade was a march by hundreds of school students in Birmingham, Alabama, May 2-5, 1963, during the American Civil Rights Movement’s Birmingham campaign.

Nation of Islam

Nation of Islam. noun. 1. an organization composed chiefly of African Americans, advocating the teachings of Islam and originally favoring the separation of black and white racial groups in the United States: members are known as Black Muslims. British Dictionary definitions for Nation of Islam Expand.

Twenty-fourth Amendment

e Twenty-fourth Amendment (Amendment XXIV) of the United States Constitution prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax.

Plessy V. Ferguson

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of “separate but equal”.

Sharecropping

Sharecropping is a system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on the land.

SNCC

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), also called (after 1969) Student National Coordinating Committee, American political organization that played a central role in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Segregation

the action or state of setting someone or something apart from other people or things or being set apart.

Integration

the action or process of integrating.

Boycott

withdraw from commercial or social relations with (a country, organization, or person) as a punishment or protest.

President Eisenhower

Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States from 1953 until 1961. He was a five-star general in the United States Army during World War II and served as Supreme Commander

Sit-in

attend a meeting or discussion without taking an active part in it.

Freedom Rides

a person who challenged racial laws in the American South in the 1960s, originally by refusing to abide by the laws designating that seating in buses be segregated by race.

Civil Rights Act 1964

Despite Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963, his proposal culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson just a few hours after House approval on July 2, 1964. The act outlawed segregation in businesses such as theaters, restaurants, and hotels.

Civil Rights Act 1968

The Civil Rights Act signed into law in April 1968-popularly known as the Fair Housing Act-prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin and sex.

President LBJ

Lyndon Baines Johnson, often referred to as LBJ, was the 36th President of the United States, a position he assumed after his service as the 37th Vice President.

Eugene “Bull” Connor

Theophilus Eugene Connor, known as Bull Connor, was the Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama, during the American Civil Rights Movement.